Twin Bombs by ISIS Kill More Than 40 People in Iraqi Capital
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(BAGHDAD) — Two bombs striking neighborhoods in Iraq’s eastern Diyala province killed at least 42 people Monday night, officials said, less than a month after the region was the scene of one of the deadliest attacks to hit the country in recent years.
The deadlier of Monday’s two attacks happened near the provincial capital, Baquba, located 35 miles (60 kilometers) northeast of Baghdad. Police said a suicide car bomb tore through a marketplace, killing at least 35 people and wounding 72.
ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack, in a statement distributed on Twitter, saying an Iraqi fighter named Abdullah al-Ansai detonated his explosives-laden vehicle in the predominantly Shiite neighborhood of Huwaydah.
The second took place in the village of Kanaan, where officials said a suicide bomber blew himself up in a residential area, killing seven people and wounding 15.
Hospital officials corroborated the casualty figures. All spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to speak to journalists.
Residents in Diyala have been calling for greater protection from security forces after ISIS bombed a crowded marketplace last month, killing 115 people, including women and children. The mostly Shiite victims were gathered to mark the end of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. The Sunni-extremist Islamic State group considers Shiites to be apostates.
The government in Baghdad vowed to apprehend the culprits and better secure Diyala. But anger is rife in the volatile province, where a number of towns were captured by ISIS last year. Iraqi forces and Kurdish fighters since have retaken those areas, but clashes between the militants and security forces continue.
The Sunni militant group has been behind several similar large-scale attacks on civilians or military checkpoints as it seeks to expand its territory. The group currently controls about a third of Iraq and Syria in a self-declared “caliphate.”
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(BEIJING) — China devalued its tightly controlled currency Tuesday following a slump in trade, allowing the yuan’s biggest one-day decline in a decade.
The central bank said the yuan’s fall was due to reforms aimed at making its exchange rate
system more market-oriented. Sustained weakness in the yuan raises the risk of tensions with China’s trading partners.
China’s move makes it the third major economy to take actions that weakened their currencies. Initiatives by Japan and the European Union over the past two years depressed the yen and euro. But analysts cautioned against seeing the change as a direct effort to help Chinese exporters.
The yuan had strengthened along with the dollar, hurting exporters and raising the risk of politically dangerous job losses in manufacturing industries that employ tens of millions of workers. July exports fell
according to data released on the weekend.
Tuesday’s move “signals a new government willingness” to let the currency decline, said USB economist Tao Wang in a report.
Beijing is likely to move cautiously but market expectations of more depreciation “could quickly become entrenched” and cause the yuan to “depreciate quite quickly and significantly,” said Wang. She said that would represent a “sea change in China’s exchange rate policy” but would help to support flagging economic growth.
The devaluation could present a dilemma for the United States and other governments that accuse Beijing of suppressing the yuan’s exchange rate, giving its exporters an unfair price advantage and hurting foreign competitors.
A weaker yuan might help Chinese exporters and prompt complaints by foreign manufacturers. But the central bank said its goal was to give market forces a bigger role, a step Washington has demanded for years.
The yuan, also known as the renminbi, is allowed to fluctuate in a band 2 percent above or below a rate set by the People’s Bank of China based on the previous day’s trading.
The bank said starting Tuesday that in addition to the previous day’s exchange rate, the daily fixing of the trading band will take into account supply and demand.
“This complex situation is posing new challenges,” said a central bank statement. It said
The center of Tuesday’s trading band was set 1.9 percent below Monday’s level. The yuan quickly fell 1.3 percent against the dollar and was down almost 1.9 percent at midday.
That was the biggest one-day decline since Beijing ended the yuan’s direct link to the U.S. dollar in July 2005 and switched to basing the exchange rate on a basket of foreign currencies. The composition of that basket is secret but the dollar appears to dominate it, which means the yuan has been rising even as the currencies of other developing countries fell.
The latest move doesn’t appear to be aimed at helping Chinese exporters even though it follows the weekend announcement of dismal July trade, said Mizuho Bank economist Vishu Varathan.
In a report, Varathan said the yuan has risen by about 3.5 percent per year since 2012 on a trade-weighted basis and the latest change only gives back part of that.
A sustained decline “risks abrasive international trade dynamics,” said Varathan. But he said a weaker yuan “could be ultimately positive for Asia” if it helps to revive Chinese demand for imports.
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Separatist insurgents staged assaults on Ukrainian villages on Monday, reports Reuters. State officials say the attacks featured the heaviest shelling in the region since February.
The Ukrainian military reported that their troops repelled tanks and around 200 rebel soldiers at the village of Novolaspa and a “battalion”-strength force with tanks and armored vehiclesin nearby Starohnativka. Both locations are about 30 miles south of Donetsk, which the separatists declared as their capital early last year.
The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry called the situation “a dangerous indication” of imminent conflict, AFP said. The attacks are the latest in recent allegations that separatist forces have breached the truce signed in Minsk in February.
On Sunday, four tanks belonging to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe were set ablaze in Donetsk. Ukrainian military spokesman Oleksandr Motuzyanyk attributed the act to “unlawful armed groups.”
The insurgents have denied attacking Ukrainian troops and framed the country’s military as the aggressors, claiming Kiev is eager to reclaim the territories that declared their autonomy last April.
Over 6,500 people have been killed since the conflict between Ukrainian forces and separatists in the territories of Donetsk and Luhansk escalated in early 2014. The conflict has also strained the West’s relations with Moscow, which many accuse of backing the rebel forces.
(ANKARA, Turkey) — Turkish warplanes struck Kurdish rebels positions in southeast Turkey, the military said Tuesday, a day after heavy violence in the country left at least nine dead.
In a statement, the Turkish military said jets overnight hit 17 targets of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, around the Buzul mountain and the Ikiyaka region in Hakkari province, which borders Iran and Iraq.
In further violence Tuesday, Kurdish rebels attacked an infantry brigade command in nearby Sirnak province, seriously wounding a soldier who later died in hospital.
On Monday, nine people, including five police officers, were killed in separate attacks in Istanbul and in the southeastern Sirnak province. The attacks were blamed on the PKK.
Turkey has seen a sharp spike in clashes between security forces and Kurdish rebels in recent weeks. At least 48 people have died during the renewed violence that has wrecked an already fragile peace process with the Kurds.
Turkish warplanes have raided PKK targets in Iraq and in southeast Turkey in tandem with airstrikes against Islamic State militants in Syria since late July.
The PKK has been fighting for Kurdish autonomy in southeast Turkey. The conflict has killed tens of thousands of people since 1984.
THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — Dutch prosecutors said Tuesday they have found what they believe could be parts of a Buk missile system at the site in eastern Ukraine where Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was brought down last year.
The announcement represents the first time prosecutors have confirmed possible physical evidence of a missile bringing down the plane and killing all 298 people on board.
The prosecutors, who are leading an international criminal probe into the deadly crash on July 17, 2014, said in a written statement that the parts “are of particular interest to the criminal investigation as they can possibly provide more information about who was involved in the crash of MH17.”
Though they have previously said a missile strike is the most likely explanation for the crash, they have never revealed that they are in possession of possible missile parts.
However, they cautioned that the conclusion cannot yet be drawn “that there is a causal connection between the discovered parts and the crash of flight MH17.”
Prosecutors will now enlist the help of weapons and forensics experts to further investigate the suspected missile parts, said spokesman Wim de Bruin. He declined to give more details of the parts that are under investigation.
The parts were found during Dutch recovery missions to the crash site. Dutch authorities have conducted several missions to the site to recover human remains, victims’ belongings and parts of the downed Boeing 777.
Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was heading from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur when it was brought down over conflict-torn Ukraine. Russian-backed rebels and Ukrainian forces have blamed one another for shooting down the plane. Both sides deny responsibility.
A report by the Dutch Safety Board into the cause of the crash is expected by the end of October, while the separate international criminal investigation is likely to take months more to complete.
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US authorities have charged nine members of an alleged international hacking and insider trading ring, the BBC understands.
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A year since a white police officer shot unarmed black 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, his family, loved ones and protesters have ensured that the teenager’s tragic death has returned to public attention with protests and a memorial march.
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Sit back, enjoy the view and take a deep breath.
A year ago, Ferguson, Missouri, was a relatively quiet working-class suburban city of St Louis. But that quickly changed when a white officer killed an unarmed black teenager - casting the relationship between the town's African American population and its majority white police under a harsh international spotlight.
When white Ferguson Police Department officer Darren Wilson shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown, he not only cut short a teenager's life but also changed his own forever.
A 91-year-old retired oral surgeon has been charged with importing cocaine hidden in soap into Australia.
Victor Twartz, of Sydney, faces a potential life prison sentence if he is convicted of importing 4.5kg (10lb) of the drug into the country on a flight from India.
His arrest has prompted the Australian Federal Police (AFP) to warn people about the dangers of being tricked into becoming drug mules.
Twartz told the ABC's 7.30 current affairs programme he had met people in New Delhi whom he had befriended online.
The powder was hidden inside the soap. Pic: Australian Federal Police
He told the programme that when he was about to board his plane to return to Sydney he was handed a bag that he was told contained gifts for someone in Australia.
After he landed at Sydney Airport, a search of Twartz's luggage found 27 packages of soap which tested positive for cocaine.
Twartz appeared in Sydney's Downing Centre Local Court on Tuesday charged with importing a commercial quantity of cocaine on 8 July.
He was released on bail and will appear in court next on 6 October.
The 27 packages of soap. Pic: Australian Federal Police
As he left court, a reporter asked the 91-year-old if he had been taken advantage of.
Twartz replied: "Always, always."
Police have not said whether Twartz was an unwitting drug courier.
But AFP manager Wayne Buchhorn warned that bringing drugs unwittingly into Australia could result in charges.
"Claiming ignorance of drugs hidden inside your luggage does not automatically mean you will not face criminal charges," he said.
"People can expect they will be charged if they knowingly bring drugs into Australia, or are reckless or wilfully blind to the fact that there could be narcotics concealed inside their luggage or items they are carrying."
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The retired surgeon's arrest prompts police to issue a warning about Australians being tricked into becoming drug mules.
Chief Correspondent Stuart Ramsay details how the Sky News team gained the trust of a British couple recruiting for IS.
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In a surprise move, the tech giant announces it will be slimmed down, with some of its newer entities to be run separately.
Iraq Suicide Bombings Kill Dozensby webdesk@voanews.com (VOA News)
Two suicide bombings in Iraq's eastern Diyala province killed at least 40 people and wounded dozens more late Monday. The deadlier of Monday's two attacks happened near the provincial capital, Baquba. A car bomb exploded in a marketplace killing at least 35 and injuring more than 70. The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the attack in a statement distributed on Twitter. A second car bomb at a checkpoint east of the city reportedly killed at least seven and...
Landmines have killed an estimated 20,000 Cambodians since the civil war ended in 1975. Now, Cambodia’s leading demining organization is training a group of rats to sniff mines out, so they can be removed safely. Maia Pujara has more.
One year after the shooting death of Michael Brown - an unarmed black man who was shot by a white police officer - another teenager has been shot by police in Ferguson, Missouri. Police say this time was different and they have filed 10 felony charges against the 18-year-old. Arash Arabasadi reports.
Ferguson Uneasy After Night of Violenceby webdesk@voanews.com (VOA News)
Ferguson, Missouri, was on edge again Monday night, a day after a protest marking the anniversary of the shooting death of Michael Brown ended with gunshots and the critical wounding of another black teenager. The threat of renewed violence hung in the air and was on the minds of residents, police, and protesters. During the late afternoon, rush hour protesters blocked an interstate highway, leading to an unspecified number of arrests. Earlier, St. Louis County officials had...
Obama Says Events Have Made Him More Open About Raceby webdesk@voanews.com (Molly McKitterick)
As the United States has woken up to problems in race relations so it seems has President Barack Obama’s ability to speak about the issue. The nation’s first black president told National Public Radio on Sunday that an “awakening around the country” to problems in race relations and police-community relations has opened the door for him to speak out. While the problems are not new, the president said social media has brought them to the attention of the public. “I think people have...
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Afghan President Demands That Pakistan Rein In Talibanby support@pangea-cms.com (RFE/RL)
The Afghan president has called on Pakistan to crack down on the Taliban after a wave of attacks in the capital left dozens dead and hundreds wounded.
EU, Rights Groups Call On Baku To Investigate Journalist’s Death by support@pangea-cms.com (RFE/RL's Azerbaijani Service)
The European Union and several human rights groups have called on authorities in Azerbaijan to conduct a full and transparent investigation into the death of journalist Rasim Aliyev.
15 Years After Kursk Disaster, Fewer Russians Critical Of State Response by support@pangea-cms.com (Tom Balmforth)
Public anger over the botched operation to rescue the crew of the sunken submarine Kursk was a nasty wake-up call for Vladimir Putin in 2000, the first year of his presidency. But 15 years later, Russians are far less critical of the government's response -- a change a leading pollster says reflects the power of state TV.
Saudi Arabia's Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir has told the Kremlin that Riyad will not join any coalition against Islamic State (IS) militants if the coalition includes Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime.
Dutch prosecutors say they have found possible parts of a Russian-made BUK missile system at the site in eastern Ukraine where Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was brought down in 2014, killing all 298 people on board.
Uzbek Concert Organizer Investigated After Deadly Bridge Tragedy by support@pangea-cms.com (RFE/RL's Uzbek Service)
The organizer of an outdoor concert marred by the fatal collapse of a bridge railing is under investigation, sources in Uzbekistan say.
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Taliban-Aligned Uzbek Militant In Syria Speaks Out Against ISby support@pangea-cms.com (Joanna Paraszczuk)
An Uzbek militant who claims to be fighting alongside the Taliban-aligned Imam Bukhori Jamaat in Syria has criticized the Islamic State (IS) group in an interview with RFE/RL's Uzbek Service.
The leader of the self-proclaimed Caucasus Emirate (Imarat Kavkaz), Magomed Suleimanov, was killed in a special operation in Russia's North Caucasus region of Daghestan on August 11.
Peskov's $620,000 Timepiece Watches Over Russian Economyby support@pangea-cms.com (Anna Shamanska)
A website is using the Kremlin watch controversy to clock Russian economic and social statistics.
Ismayilova Suggests Azerbaijani Court Rushing Toward Verdictby support@pangea-cms.com (RFE/RL's Azerbaijani Service)
A Baku court has pressed ahead with the trial of Khadija Ismayilova, shrugging off the absence of the investigative journalist's lawyers and her call for a slower pace.
Azerbaijani Soccer Player Arrested Over Beating Death Of Journalistby support@pangea-cms.com (RFE/RL's Azerbaijani Service)
Police in Azerbaijan have arrested a well-known player of the Qabala FK soccer club, Cavid Huseynov, in a case related to the beating of a journalist to death.
World Briefing: Venezuela: U.S. Lawyer Is Killedby THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The lawyer, John Ralston Pate, 70, was found dead Sunday in an apartment in an affluent neighborhood of eastern Caracas.
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The movie-star heroine of Ayn Rand’s “Ideal” is a legendary, enigmatic beauty named Kay Gonda, paid a fortune by Hollywood for her work and worshiped by the faceless multitudes. Her press agent writes: “Kay Gonda does not cook her own meals or knit her own underwear. She does not play golf, adopt babies, or endow hospitals for homeless horses. She is not kind to her dear old mother — shehas no dear old mother. She is not just like you and me. She never was like you and me. She’s like nothing you rotters ever dreamt of.”
In short, Kay Gonda is one of Rand’s Nietzschean protagonists — an über-frau who has fans, not friends, and who thinks that she towers above all the losers and “second-handers” who populate the world. She is also, it turns out, a close relative of Dominique Francon in the early portions of “The Fountainhead” (a character Rand once described as “myself in a bad mood”)— a pessimist radically alienated from a world she regards with disdain.
The premise of “Ideal” is that Gonda is on the run, suspected of murder and seeking refuge with a succession of fans who have written her mash notes; most turn out to be hypocrites and weaklings who pledge undying loyalty and love but betray her in her supposed hour of need.
Like most Rand characters, Gonda (inspired by Greta Garbo, according to Leonard Peikoff, the executor of Rand’s estate, in an introduction he wrote to this book) is less a person than a speechifying symbol, and her story never rises even a smidgen above the preposterous. The reader instantly understands why this novel, written in 1934, was set aside by Rand and not published until now, and why the play version (also in this volume) was not produced during her lifetime.
The story is an ugly, diagrammatic illustration of Rand’s embrace of selfishness and elitism and her contempt for ordinary people — the unfortunate, the undistinguished, those too nice or too modest to stomp and roar like the hard man Howard Roark in “The Fountainhead.” It underscores the reasons that her work — with its celebration of defiance and narcissism, its promotion of selfishness as a philosophical stance — so often appeals to adolescents and radical free marketers. And it is also a reminder of just how much her didactic, ideological work actually has in common with the message-minded socialist realism produced in the Soviet Union, which she left in the mid-1920s and vociferously denounced.
The only redeeming feature of “Ideal” is that both the novel and play are slender works, giving Rand less space to bloviate than in “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead.” As it is, her characters here make comically portentous statements and engage in breathless, grandiose exchanges.
Gonda says to one fan: “I kill the things men live for. But they come to see me, because I make them see that they want those things killed.” And she has this conversation with another:
“Ah, Johnnie, Johnnie, of what account is life?”
“None. But who made it so?”
“Those who cannot dream.”
“No. Those who can only dream.”
The point throughout much of this novel and play — as it is in much of Rand’s work — is that most people are sniveling fools or sheepish sheep, afraid to pursue their dreams or claw their way to the top: They are hypocrites unable to live up to their professed ideals, cowards who live vicariously through others. There’s a henpecked businessman who throws Gonda over in favor of toadying to his nagging wife and his harridan of a mother-in-law. There’s an artist who specializes in portraits of Gonda but doesn’t recognize her in person. And there’s an evangelist who urges Gonda to confess when she comes to him, seeking refuge.
For readers, Gonda is not an exceptional Nietzschean creature, but an entitled, nihilistic princess suffering from a narcissistic personality disorder. When one character asks her if she really thinks she is superior to everyone else, she replies: “I do. I wish I didn’t have to.” And when told that she was complicit in a young man’s suicide, she coolly says it was “the kindest thing I have ever done.”
IDEAL
The Novel and the Play
By Ayn Rand
246 pages. New American Library. $16.
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FERGUSON, Mo. — With scores of police officers in the streets and a portion of the region under a state of emergency, an edgy calm prevailed in this St. Louis suburb early Tuesday, one night after bursts of gunfire had led to fears of renewed unrest.
Although nightfall brought intermittent clashes between protesters and the police — the St. Louis County police said the authorities had made 23 arrests along West Florissant Avenue — there were few signs of widening turmoil that might draw a sterner response by local officials or by Gov. Jay Nixon, who last year deployed the National Guard here.
“During the protest events, there were no shootings, shots fired, burglaries, lootings or property damages,” the St. Louis County police said in a statement early Tuesday, not long after many officers and state troopers had left West Florissant Avenue, the street that has seen dozens of tense standoffs since a white police officer killed Michael Brown, a black teenager, on Aug. 9, 2014.
Earlier Monday night, bottles and rocks had occasionally flown through the humid summer air as hundreds of people gathered, but the police said they knew of no injuries to demonstrators or officers. Although law enforcement officials were reported to have sometimes used pepper spray to control the crowd, they said that no tear gas had been used.
Demonstrators occasionally blocked the road, and officials often responded with threats of arrest.
“This is the St. Louis County Police Department,” one officer said through a loudspeaker as other officers, many wearing riot gear, formed a skirmish line. “Get out of the roadway.”
The calm, uneasy as it sometimes seemed, stood in sharp contrast with the Ferguson of roughly 24 hours earlier, when gunfire echoed through the streets and police detectives wounded an 18-year-old man they said had shot at them. St. Louis County prosecutors on Monday filed charges against the man, Tyrone Harris Jr. of St. Louis, and said he remained hospitalized in critical condition.
The authorities said they had recovered a 9-millimeter Sig Sauer next to Mr. Harris that was reported stolen last year.
But Mr. Harris’s grandmother said that his girlfriend, who had been with him, had told her that Mr. Harris had been running across West Florissant Avenue to escape gunfire. The grandmother, Gwen Drisdel, said that she did not know whether Mr. Harris had been armed. It would not have been unreasonable for him to carry a firearm given how violent the streets are, she said, but she added, “I don’t believe that he would disrespect police like that.”
The troubles of Sunday night prompted Steve Stenger, the St. Louis County executive, to declare a state of emergency and to place Jon Belmar, the county’s police chief, in control of police operations related to protests in Ferguson. Mr. Stenger stopped short of imposing a curfew, however, as the governor did last summer, and the relative calm of Monday night raised hopes that the city had averted another enduring crisis.
But the question that has followed Ferguson for about a year — and that is poised to shadow the city into Tuesday — is whether the calm will last. Even though the authorities mostly maintained order on Monday, an occasional feeling of lawlessness pulsed through Ferguson, where cars and motorcycles sometimes appeared to drag race just yards away from officers who did nothing to stop them.
There was also some concern about the presence of a national group, the Oath Keepers, which is sometimes described as a citizen militia and whose members walked West Florissant Avenue and openly carried rifles. Law enforcement officials have been wary of the group in the past, particularly after it took up positions in Ferguson during the unrest there in November.
“We’re just Americans trying to keep our fellow man safe,” said John, an Oath Keeper who did not provide his last name but said he was from Missouri.
Others said they were deeply skeptical.
“We don’t trust them,” said Leah Humphrey, a 24-year-old demonstrator from Indianapolis who stood nearby. “We don’t trust the white people with assault rifles. They didn’t bring one black person with them, and they walked up on us like they’re asserting their white privilege.”
She added, “They don’t care about the actual struggle, Mike Brown, the Black Lives Matter movement.”
Before dusk on Monday, protests around Ferguson led to scores of arrests, including more than 60 after a brief shutdown of Interstate 70. The United States attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, Richard G. Callahan, also said that 57 people had been arrested outside the federal courthouse in St. Louis.
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When President Obama, the Koch Brothers, the American Civil Liberties Union and Newt Gingrich all agree on an issue, you know that something important may be happening.
And you also know that there must be a catch, or maybe three.
“Criminal justice reform” — cutting back on a rate of incarceration that jumped fourfold in four decades — has become a bipartisan buzzword. Many people of different political stripes agree that too many Americans are being imprisoned for too long, with too little rehabilitation, consuming public budgets and hollowing out African-American communities in particular.
Although the number of people held in state and federal prisons appears to have leveled off at about 1.6 million — 2.2 million if those in local jails are counted — some scholars and activists are calling for far more ambitious change. They ask: Why not reduce the prison population by a quarter or even by half? (That would still leave it far higher than it was a few decades back, when crime was more rampant than today.)
President Obama won wide praise last month when he said to the N.A.A.C.P. that while violent criminals need to be kept behind bars, “Over the last few decades we’ve also locked up more and more nonviolent drug offenders than ever before, for longer than ever before,” adding, “And that is the real reason our prison population is so high.”
Congress is bubbling with bipartisan bills that would scale back mandatory sentences for nonviolent drug crimes and strengthen rehabilitation programs for nonviolent offenders.
But the president and Congress can have a direct impact only on federal prisons, which hold one in seven of the country’s prisoners. There has been little of the bottom-up number-crunching of state data needed to see what changes in enforcement and sentencing, for what kinds of crimes, it would take to scale back incarceration in a significant way.
A new interactive “prison population forecaster,” posted online Tuesday by the Urban Institute, a liberal-leaning think tank in Washington, aims to help fill that void and yields some sobering conclusions.
The interactive program allows you to assess for yourself the impact of different policy changes. Cut in half the sentences for those convicted of property crimes? Inmates in 2021 are down by 10 percent.
What surprised me most in using the tool, as one who has followed the debate on criminal reform, is just how hard it will be to turn back the clock and achieve deep reductions in incarceration. Traffic tickets for pot smokers won’t take us there, and neither will making petty thieves sweep sidewalks or retroactively ending the wildly disparate sentences for crack possession.
Some findings are encouraging: In states including Kentucky, Missouri and Texas, there remains “low-hanging fruit,” in the words of Ryan King, an author of the new forecasting tool. These include relatively easy changes in low-level drug sentencing and parole revocations for minor violations that can make a serious dent in those states that have not already made them. In such states, reducing prison admissions for nonviolent crimes by half would cut the number of inmates in 2021 by more than 25 percent.
But in many other states, including Michigan, New Jersey and New York, drug sentences are already reduced. There is no avoiding the politically poisonous question of releasing violent offenders or reducing their long sentences. “We need to start what’s going to be a long and difficult conversation about violent crime,” Mr. King said.
I was startled by these calculations for New Jersey, for example: Cutting in half the number of people sent to prison for drug crimes would reduce the prison population at the end of 2021 by only 3 percent. By contrast, cutting the effective sentences, or time actually served, for violent offenders by just 15 percent would reduce the number of inmates in 2021 by 7 percent — more than twice as much, but still hardly the revolution many reformers seek.
New Jersey could reduce its prison population by 25 percent by 2021. But to do it, it would have to take the politically fraught step of cutting in half the effective sentences for violent offenders.
In other words, the real debate over how to deal with criminals has hardly begun. And that debate will inevitably have to be argued state by state on terms that may well cause the bipartisan agreement on the need for change, focused on nonviolent offenders, to break down.
It is true that because of long and often mandatory sentences, half of all federal prisoners are in for drug crimes, though how many should be considered nonviolent is in dispute. But in any case, federal prisons account for only 14 percent of the country’s prisoners, some 216,000 in 2013, the last year for which data are published.
State prisons hold the remaining 86 percent, about 1.4 million inmates. Only one in six of them are in for drug offenses, and that share is declining. The sentences are usually short, and those caught for simple possession are unlikely to go to prison. (Offenders still bear a heavy personal toll for a criminal conviction, reason enough for major reforms, but low-level drug arrests are not driving the incarceration numbers.)
Just over half of all state prisoners were convicted of violent crimes like assaults, gun crimes, robbery, rape and murder, with some people serving lengthy “habitual offender” sentences.
The inescapable facts revealed to anyone using with the Urban Institute tool: Big cuts in incarceration must come at the state level, and they will have to involve rethinking of sentences for violent criminalsas well as unarmed drug users and burglars.
The Urban Institute researchers analyzed the 15 states with the best available prison data, which together account for 40 percent of the country’s state prison population. The researchers said their data was loosely representative of the national picture.
They found that with no further policy changes, the states’ prison population would decline by just 2 percent by 2021.
More salient today: Cutting drug admissions to half of their current level across the 15 states would shrink their prison population by 7 percent.
“Even if every person in state prison for a drug offense were released today, mass incarceration would persist,” the report said.
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